The soft paywall: Some more numbers to chew on

Submitted by yelvington on January 25, 2010 - 12:53pm

OK, one more post about the "soft paywall" concept and then I'll move on to something else.

Paid-content discussions tend to be dominated by religious wars -- declarations of belief, not fact -- so I want to do what I can to inject some facts when I can.

As I've pointed out repeatedly, averages are useless and segmentation is essential if we're going to understand human behavior and discover whether there is any real reader-revenue opportunity left in local journalism.

Cookie monster versus "soft" paywalls

Submitted by yelvington on January 23, 2010 - 7:48pm

Pretty much everybody who's talking seriously these days about asking users to pay for news content is pointing at the same model: Leave the website open to casual visitors, but require heavy users to sign up as paying customers. Let people see perhaps half a dozen stories a month, but if they show signs of high interest, present them with a bill for the content they're consuming.

Going mobile with a news site that Just Works

Submitted by yelvington on January 22, 2010 - 12:25pm

Point #2 of my Seven simple thoughts about the Mobile Web was "Your old website should Just Work. ... When someone wants to use your website from a mobile browser for whatever reason, including following a link that someone sent them through Twitter, it should detect the user's browser and deliver an appropriately formatted page."

What we won't learn from the New York Times' paywall

Submitted by yelvington on January 20, 2010 - 5:46pm

So the New York Times has announced it will begin charging for access to its website, using a metered model similar to the one I discussed recently. The reactions have been predictable. I want to focus on one small angle: What we won't learn.

We won't learn a thing this year, because they're not doing it until 2011.

Paid content and the march to Paris

Submitted by yelvington on January 11, 2010 - 10:15am

There's an incident from World War II that I think can teach us something about paid content.

At the end of the first war, the French built a series of defensive fortifications along the border with Germany called the Maginot Line. It was supposed to make it too expensive for the Germans to attack, because they would have to conquer heavily defended positions.

But the Germans simply avoided the line, using new technology to practice fast-moving "lightning war," crossing into Belgium, flanking the Maginot fortifications, and proceeding to Paris.

The passing of Editor & Publisher

Submitted by yelvington on December 10, 2009 - 3:03pm

In the newsroom of the first daily newspaper that employed me, Editor & Publisher magazine was forbidden because of the employment classifieds that justified the "editor" part of its title. The editor regarded it as subversive literature, luring his staff to faraway places with the promise of riches, or at least a living wage.

Thinking about a paywall? Read this first

Submitted by yelvington on December 1, 2009 - 10:39am

If you're thinking about charging for content, this high-quality infographic could save you from making a big mistake:

What is this? It's the general shape of your typical newspaper website's user behavior over the course of a month.

This is a not a graph that your typical Web metrics system offers up without a struggle, but if you can force it to reveal this data, it's eye-opening. I first pulled this sort of curve out of a Tacoda system half a dozen years ago, and it changed a lot of my thinking.